What a wet and wild week it’s been. Yesterday’s storms did tremendous damage throughout the county, taking out roads and trees and, for a short period, Cruzio’s email, phone and web servers. With limited power supply, we focused our energies on our customers’ services over our own internal systems and communication tools. Now those services are restored, we wanted to check in and let you know what happened here, and what we’re doing about it.

Firstly, no email was lost during the outage, only delayed. But Cruzio believes web and email access should operate normally, whether the power is off or on. For storms such as these, Cruzio has successfully operated two backup generators at our downtown Network Operations Center for many years with minimal downtime. This is the last storm our faithful generators and our old NOC will have to ride out.

At our new facility at 877 Cedar (the old Sentinel building) we have a much more stable power infrastructure with 5,000 pounds of battery backup and a huge 150 kilowatt generator the size of a minivan (see picture below.) When the storm took out power downtown yesterday, we were in the process of finalizing the move of all our servers to our new data center. No excuses, but if the storm had hit a little later, there would have been no outage.

We’ve spent the last 24 months bolstering our infrastructure by bringing fiber to downtown, developing robust redundant wireless backhaul, improving our offsite backups, moving into a new facility and dramatically improving our power systems. We’re doing everything possible to make sure our members, and the Santa Cruz community, are as protected as possible from disruptions to their Internet services like we briefly had yesterday.

This latest storm illustrated once again why that’s been time and money well spent.

We sincerely apologize for any disruption the outage may have caused you and your inability to reach us in that time.

Best regards,
The folks at Cruzio